Russian airstrikes kill seven in war-battered Aleppo

By Halit Suleyman

ALEPPO, Syria (AA) – Seven civilians were killed and another 45 injured by Russian airstrikes carried out in Syria’s northwestern Aleppo province, a local civil defense official said Tuesday.

"Russian warplanes struck the opposition-controlled towns of Al-Shear, Misqan Khanuna, Muyesir, Karm al-Tarrab, Firdous and Al-Sukkari east of Aleppo," Najib Ensari, an Aleppo-based civil defense official, told Anadolu Agency.

Civil defense teams managed to rescue a number of people from under the rubble of collapsed buildings, Ensari said.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed -- and more than 10 million displaced -- across the war-battered country, according to UN figures.

The Syrian Center for Policy Research, a Beirut-based NGO, has put the total death toll from the five-year-old conflict at more than 470,000.